Increasing demands faced by medical professionals can make the process of seeking and receiving personalized healthcare a challenge for patients. From a doctor's perspective, managing a medical practice using existing systems can make treatment, organization, time management, and communication with patients difficult. For example, medical records maintained in paper files are often difficult and cumbersome to store, retrieve, and manage. Even electronic medical records may be difficult to navigate using existing systems. Since scheduling programs, health records, billing programs, and patient communication programs may span multiple platforms or applications such as calendar systems, patient database systems, and various email systems. Thus, a doctor may use unrelated systems for managing appointments, patient records, communications, and other information.
From a patient's perspective, a busy doctor often seems inattentive and communication with a doctor may be limited to office visits or short phone calls. Patients tend to feel removed from the healthcare experience because of limited interaction with their doctors as well as lack of access to their own medical information.
These and other drawbacks exist.